Today’s June 21, the day after my due date, and still no baby. But I started this email weeks ago! So I decided to interject updates throughout this email rather than restarting it. Hopefully it isn’t too confusing!

Today’s Wednesday June 5. I figured I should go ahead and write my email for the week in case I go into labor! I mean, you never know. Also, I have nothing else to do at the moment: we have no power, again. If you follow me on IG stories, you’ve been keeping up with the no-power saga.

Last week, an awful storm came through and knocked down a whole lot of trees in the area. Many of the trees fell on power lines, which left us without power. Luckily, we do have a gas-powered generator, so we are able to plug in 3-4 things at a time. Because we have well water that has an electric pump (rather than city water), we lose water when the power goes out. We keep a few big jugs of water in the house, for brushing teeth, cleaning a few dishes, that sort of thing. For toilet flushing, we use a big bucket and use water from the swimming pool (or rain water, if we leave a bucket outside when it’s raining, but it doesn’t last more than a couple of flushes).

Anyway, last night, it went out again - I’m not totally sure why. It was not raining and was just barely windy. There must have been a tree (or several) leaning on power lines somewhere that just needed a gentle nudge to fall fully over. It’s 1pm now, so time will tell!

A lot of folks around here have a full-home generator that automatically kicks on if the power goes out. It’s a big investment, though, but one we will consider! We’ve lost power SO MANY times in the last year! Is that a thing where you live? I wonder if it’s just because we live in a rural area, or if it’s common in other areas as well.

House update

The add-on is NOT complete! But the exterior is finished. We have all new windows, a new roof, new siding (the wood layer on the outside that’s painted green), and new fascia. It looks so pretty, I love it. We will likely add some bushes to cover the bottom part (where you can see the cement blocks). A lot of people were asking about this on IG, the pier-and-beam style of foundation. There are several types of foundation for a house, and pier-and-beam is just one of them. It’s common in the southern US, where there’s softer soil and more flooding.

Finally the framing inspector (we’ve been waiting nearly 2 weeks for this guy!) showed up today to approve the framing in the add-on. Now that he has approved that (phew), we can move on to the interior work: sheetrock, lighting, flooring, painting, all that stuff. If all goes to plan, this last stage should take 3-4 weeks. That means, it will for sure be after the baby comes, but I’m glad things are moving again.

A few recipes

I don’t have a meal plan this time, but I do have a few recipes for you to try:

Last time, I said we were going to make some fish sticks, but we had not tried the recipe yet. I’m here to say, we tried it, and we loved it. Great recipe - neat trick to pre-toast the bread crumbs! They were flavorful and crispy. Here is a link for that once more! (I THINK I made it so that you can click the picture to go to the recipe, too.)

Another recipe I want to share is Instant Pot Chicken Pasta. This was super easy and yummy. The kids had seconds, and there was enough left over that they had it again for lunch the next day. (IG recipe, TikTok recipe)

I made myself a “due date cake” yesterday. It was a cookie cake, and it turned out delicious! Here’s the cookie cake recipe.

Alexander’s birthday

Big A turns 11 next week. Neato!

You may remember that I like to have the kids give me their cake idea - whatever they want - and I’ll do my best to make it. I’ve made some really fun cakes over the years, tried some things I never thought I could do, and learned a lot about cake decorating along the way. Mine are no where near professional (I mean, 2-3 cakes per year is not enough practice haha), but the kids seem to like it. I hope they are a core memory for them when they grow up.

So far, the only ideas he’s given me are “Zelda” and “pizza”, and he wants one layer to be cookies-and-cream ice cream. I’ve done an ice cream cake in the past, and it’s quite tricky. Delicious but tricky. The icing doesn’t want to stay put because the cold ice cream gets slick. The icing just slips around. I think the best option is to make a sort of whipped cream + buttercream hybrid? I will do a little digging around to come up with the best option. (Stabilized whipped cream worked as a barrier, then I piped buttercream onto that!)

I’m also not totally sure how things will play out - the baby may come a few days before his birthday, which would give me some time to make the cake when I get back from the hospital. I know people are going to give me a hard time for not resting, but… my oldest kid is having a birthday, and those only happen once a year. It’s also possible that baby will come ON his birthday, which would be neat. OR it could happen soon after. We’ll see!! ❤️ 

UPDATE: The cake turned out super cute 🙂 Click here for the video, and if you don’t want to do that, here’s just a picture!

USA geography games

A friend of ours gave us a game called Great States! It’s a map-based game for learning and practicing USA geography. Alexander and Annabelle both really like it. She doesn’t know nearly as much as he does about the states and capitals, but she’s able to play because she can look for key words and pictures on the map. It’ll say something like “

Which 2 states produce the most oranges?” And she can look around on the map for oranges, which are shown on both Florida and California.

Alexander has been diggin’ states, capitals, their shapes, all of that. So he’s really into it.

Additionally, someone on IG told me about an app called Stack the States. It’s NOT a free app, but we’ve already gotten hours out of it. (App store, Google play)

And also, I recently bought these second-hand from a fellow homeschool mom: they are small bookmark-sized game boards, and you wrap a string around them as you match the left side to the right. It’s hard to explain, but they’re fun to play with. If you get the answers right, you can see the lines match up on the back of the card. They’re called wrap-ups.

Project based learning

I’ve got several websites pulled up at the moment (homeschool.com, gatherroundhomeschool.com, harborandsprout.com) that all offer some ideas for project-based learning.

And then today, I was reading this book called The Gift of Failure, and she brought up project-based learning. And it’s just got me thinking that I want to give this a try next school year.

My friend Emmy does it and seems to like it a lot. It’s just such a shift from what I’m used to as a homeschool mom AND what I’m familiar with from my own educational experience as a student.

Basically, (I think) you pick a topic, or you let the kids pick, and then you just learn all the subjects through a particular project. It lets them learn through experience and research rather than typical book work. Does that mean there’s NO book work? I can’t get my head around it - I need someone to give me a 6-week project that works for multiple grade levels, that shows how it covers math, science, language, history, and so on.

So if you know of something super specific and structured and clear-cut — a “beginner project-based learning project” — that’d be wonderful!!

Final notes

Charlie’s been SO chatty lately. He talks in fuller sentences. He asks a lot of questions. He describes things that are happening, things he sees. He loves doing puzzles — we’re up to 100 pieces now. He doesn’t do them totally on his own or anything, but he is really good at understanding how they go together.

I’ve been posting a vlog every day to my TikTok - I’ve gotten very little traction (like views and follows), but that’s alright. It’s mostly been personally satisfying to go back and see what I did each day, like how some folks journal each night.

It’s been a long several weeks, but hopefully I’ll get back to regular newsletters after this one. I had it in my head that I was going to have the baby weeks ago, which is why I didn’t end up sending a newsletter - I was thinking “I’ll just send it after the baby comes!” 😏

How are you doing? Any fun plans this summer? ❤️ 

Wanna send a little something my way?

If you’d like to support me and my content, then here are three ways:

• Send along an encouraging note, here or on IG or even snail mail!

• You can “Buy Me a Coffee” - it’s a virtual tip jar!

• And finally, here is a link to my Amazon wish list! There are some baby-related items on there too. 🙂 Also, my PO Box is still open!

  • Bethany King

  • PO Box 8152

  • Shreveport LA 71148

Much love,
Bethany

PS If you want to see old emails, here’s a link to all of them!